About Me

My Cooking Story:

Hi, I’m Laura, the voice behind Family Spice for the past five years. I am a stay-at-home-mom to three glorious children and a wife to one heck of a lucky man! I started blogging as a way to express myself creatively. I left my career in advertising as an account executive and graphic designer to stay home and raise my kidlets.

Growing up, I enjoyed cooking and helping my own mother in the kitchen, from Persian food to Cajun. Cooking new things never intimidated me. And with a meticulous husband who refuses to eat a boring casserole, I found myself searching for meals that would satisfy all five of us every night. My cooking experience gave birth to this blog.

I have always been comfortable behind the computer and the camera lens, and I quickly learned HTML and CSS. I designed all of her artwork, logos, and blog. I also edits all of her photography. Getting creative in the kitchen, combining fresh ingredients, contrasting flavors, exotic spices and multiple cooking techniques from all over the world continues to be my passion today.

My philosophy to cooking is, if you can read, you can read a recipe. If you can read a recipe, you can cook.

Kinda like in the movie, “Ratatouille.”

“Anyone can cook”.~ Auguste Gusteau

My Creative Story:

I am a Jill-Of-All-Trades. In high school, you could find me with a camera around my neck. I was on the high school newspaper and photographed our school events for our local community newspaper. I even spent a semester mentoring at The Houston Chronicle.

I attended the University of Arizona and got my BSBA in Advertising/Marketing. I still had a creative streak running through me, but it kinda got lost.

After graduation, I began my journey into the ad world and learned all about graphic design, page layout, media buying, radio and tv.

I was a sponge.

Fast forward to here and now. I live in San Diego, a stay-at-home-mom with three kids. I quickly found that I needed to express myself and be creative.

With the internet and the blogosphere I found my calling.

I designed my original website & blog myself. If you must know, I learned HTML and I use PhotoShop religiously.

There – I am out of the closet. I am a graphic designing geek.

I upgraded my camera from a Canon point & shoot to a Nikon D60. In 2013 I purchased a D7000 and I haven’t looked back. I am continually trying to improve my pictures, my website and my writing.

In March of 2012, I merged my blog (familyspiceblog.com) and website (familyspice.com), created my own recipe database (with over 400 recipes), switched to WordPress and completely changed the look of my site. Read more about that here.

The response was so positive that we were encouraged to bring our book to print. And we did. Mary and I have self-published our own 132-page hardback cookbook. We added more information, more recipes and more photographs! My graphic design background came in handy as I did all the photography and book design myself. You can purchase our book here.

To sum it up, I love getting creative in the kitchen. I love photography. I hate washing the dishes.